World War II from an easel

Critique In 1919, in a forest near Berlin, the painter Otto Mueller created, touch by touch, the painting “Two Naked Girls”. This new album by Luz has the particularity of being told from the point of view of the work itself. ★★★★☆

At the beginning: a blank page. The subject of the book does not yet exist. It is 1919 in a forest near Berlin. The painter Otto Mueller works, touch by touch, to create the painting “Two Naked Girls”, with his wife Maschka Meyerhofer as the model. The image takes shape, gradually becoming a regular rectangle – and a comic strip panel. Because this new album by Luz has the particularity of being told from the point of view of the eponymous work: we do not see the painting in question, we see what he sees. First hung in the artist’s studio, it was bought by the Jewish collector Ismar Littmann, then plundered by the Nazis and presented in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich in 1937 and thus tossed around for a century.

Fresh from a comic book on the ravages of toxic masculinity (“Testosterror”, 2023), Luz changes register to retrace the horror of the Second World War via this inanimate witness. His meticulous artistic investigation is a way for the man who worked for “Charlie Hebdo” for a long time to warn against any form of censorship. The icing on the cake is that it excels at fully exploiting the potential offered by the ba…